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Transforming Your Podcast with Buzzsprout Features: Alban Brooke · Story Scaling

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: We are podcastvideoscom.
• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Our goal is to educate, enlighten, engage and entertain.
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: We believe in the power of love and transformation through storytelling.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Hey everybody, welcome back.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: This is Story Scaling.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: I'm Dan Kraft, editorial Director here at podcastvideoscom, and, instead of the normal crew, we have with us today an industry expert from the outside world.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: This is Alvin Brooke, and he is the marketing director for Buzzsprout, which is one of the probably best known audio hosting companies out there.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Alvin, thanks for being with us.
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: Dan, thank you for having me.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: I really appreciate it.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's good to have an outside perspective.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: We're here in Arkansas.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: You guys, I believe, are down in Florida, but you've been in this business for quite some time and we're still a little bit new.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: We're growing, but it's always good to hear from somebody who's been doing it a while.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: Let's talk Buzzsprout and some of the features you've got, what exactly you guys do and how you can help aspiring podcasters, established guys and what else is out there.
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: Sure, so Buzzsprout we help people get their podcasts online and out to the world.
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: We started about 15 years ago as just a way to help people, who mostly is nonprofits and churches trying to get podcasts up.
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: That's who we started with and then, over the years, have grown to be one of the largest podcast hosts in the world.
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: So if you've got a podcast and you're looking to get it out to the world, we'd love to help people.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: I actually noticed a report that came out not long ago from Podmatch that noted they were talking downloads and they said hey, these numbers are based on Buzzsprout, but they have enough of an industry share that we're just going to call that an industry average.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: Not a bad little brag for you guys.
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: That's very kind of the Podmatch team.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: Let's jump into one topic that I actually pulled from a report you guys did with Podmatch and that is just the terminology of downloads.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: Obviously we are podcastvideoscom.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: We've looked at YouTube views and impressions and there's more to podcasting numbers than just the standard audio download there used to be.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: Can you explain kind of how you guys look at those numbers?
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: That was awesome.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: Let me get this back up there's.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: There's no wind in here.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: I don't know what's going on the sprout was not buzzing, it was falling the collapsed sprout yeah um uh, yeah, we'll, we'll start that one again.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: Question again, or you want me to jump into it?
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: I go for it If you think you're ready.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: Sure, Um.
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: Well, I always like to start with all the other measurements that we have, because as soon as we start talking about downloads, it makes more sense in the context of what everybody else is doing.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: So in the old days we used to have hits on websites.
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: That was just like how many times somebody had opened up that website.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: Now we talk about views on YouTube.
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: We've got things like the amount of likes and engagements you get on a social post, and over time, these numbers have just always trended towards what's the biggest number we can come up with.
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: So TikTok, I think, is's the biggest number we can come up with.
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: So TikTok, I think, is like the biggest of the big.
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: They're like oh, as soon as there's like half a second of you on this TikTok, then we're counting it as a view and that's like the main thing we're going to share is how many times someone's viewed it, and I think it's.
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: We're kind of just getting to a place where everyone wants to inflate the numbers as much as possible.
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: But with podcasts we are sharing downloads and those downloads are actually pretty filtered even by the time we start reporting them.
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: So we're going to identify bots, pull them out.
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: We identified that maybe the same person downloaded this episode multiple times.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: We're going to pull those out, so doing quite a bit to try to filter it down to these are what we think to be legitimate downloads.
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: People are really downloading with the intent of listening to this podcast.
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: So you're trying to identify intent and actual usage of the download or the view, as opposed to just the quick hit that we're may have just blown across their screen momentarily.
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: If there was stuff we could do to figure out you know this person is planning to listen to it we would love to incorporate that as well.
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: That is not brought in, but if I see you downloaded this episode twice on your phone, I'm looking at that.
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: You know we're looking at on the back end going okay, same IP address, same user agent, right back to back.
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: Obviously that's the same phone doing it twice.
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: No way they meant to download this twice.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: You know, we're only going to count that one.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: Realistically, that's one.
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: Right, and.
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: But unfortunately, what we don't have is what we really, really want to know, and that's listens.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: Yes, how much time does someone listen?
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: And even better than that would be, how much were they actually paying attention?
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: That could only happen if we were in the room, but everybody is trying to figure these things out.
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: The best data really comes from places like Apple Podcasts, because they see the download happens.
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: That's the Buzzsprout side, but Apple can actually look at it and see oh, they clicked play and they listened to 40% of the episode.
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: All right, we're pretty sure this person was engaged.
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: They might take action based on listening to that episode.
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: So I always like track downloads as a whole, because that's the best data that we can get on the podcast hosting side.
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: But then I love diving into Apple podcasts, spotify, sometimes different apps, and getting more information about how many people are not just downloading but are also listening and are seem to be engaged with the episode.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: And YouTube uh will show you how long you've retained listeners uh slash viewers, if that's what you want to call them.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: New words coming out every day.
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: Statistics are incredible for that.
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: You'll be able to see somebody stuck around for 12 minutes and then everybody seems to drop off.
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: You can dive into okay, why are people dropping off right here?
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's where I did a lengthy ad break.
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: That wasn't really related, and so you can realize okay, these are things that I want to make sure I do to keep retention high and other things I can Mm-hmm you're only worried about the intent to listen.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: You get into YouTube and you wonder how many of them are actively watching it.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: Are they passively watching or really not paying attention to the video side and just using it as a new audio platform?
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: They have a few more questions to answer and analytics just becomes the next big thing to try and really drill down into for business here big thing to try and really drill down into for business here and I would say from the marketing side.
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: it is always good to be paying attention to these stats because you're wanting to check the trends.
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: Are we moving in the right direction?
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: Are we moving in the wrong direction?
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: But I never take them as gospel, because every stat has multiple caveats and you just may not know what they are.
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a YouTube video, but sometimes people put on a YouTube video and they walk out of the room.
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: There's a restaurant in town that I know they just play YouTube videos up on the screen.
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: So that's not a normal view.
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: That's actually like 12 people might be watching that video.
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: So it's actually higher and every stat has got some of this going into it, that video.
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: So it's actually higher and every stat has got some of this going into it.
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: But what I want to see is okay from the stat.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: I have downloads to the stat.
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: I really care about revenue from the podcast or whatever the goal is for the podcast.
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: You know I'm tracking two things.
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: I'm tracking the goal, the conversion rate and those downloads, and I'm kind of just watching them trying to make sure hey, we're moving in the right direction and running little experiments to see can I nudge these numbers in the correct direction.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: Sure, and there's been some articles written, some some news out in within the industry that says even the basic assumption of one download, one listen may not be correct because you may have multiple people listening to a single download.
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: You could have multiple people listening.
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: That call co-listening.
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: You've also got people like me who've got four different podcast apps across different devices that maybe are downloading it multiple times, and we just went through this big thing with Apple podcasts recently where they said, hey, if somebody doesn't listen to the latest three episodes or something like that, they're like we're just going to stop auto downloading.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: And then everybody realized, man, there were a lot of people who were auto downloading episodes but weren't listening to them.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: Everybody had a bunch of episodes downloaded and there was there was no traction there because they weren't necessarily downloading them.
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: Apple was pretty well shoving them down their throats because they downloaded a single episode.
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: Or the person said you know, like me, I go, oh, I really aspire to listen to this Wall Street Journal podcast every day.
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: And then, you know, I look back at it and go, whoa, I haven't listened to this in a week.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: Well, I guess I'm not listening to those last six, I'll just listen to the one for today, right?
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: And I think sometimes there's aspirational listening happening.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: Let's talk some of the basics of utilizing Buzzsprout.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: For somebody who's trying to go ahead and get their audio up, get it out, make sure it's it's going somewhere, and just in terms of getting audio or audio video files into Buzzsprout, I noticed you guys can actually we can drop a video file in there as long as it's under, I believe, six gigabytes, and it will extract the audio that way too.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: That's a nice feature for well, depending on what I guess, what you're recording in you know, you know how long a podcast you can do where you would need to drop an audio only file versus a video.
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: But what are some of the hiccups or roadblocks you see to people trying just trying to get in, get set up and get their audio uploaded?
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: Well, on the technical side, we are building everything to be as user friendly as possible side.
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: We are building everything to be as user-friendly as possible.
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: So when we started with nonprofits and churches, we noticed a lot of people don't know much about megabytes, gigabytes, encodings and video files and file formats.
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: And so we said you know what, just give us whatever you think you're supposed to give us and we're going to do our very best.
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: If it's in the right, if it's encoded correctly and it's tagged and it's a nice MP3, well, we're going to leave it alone because we know you're probably an audio engineer and you got it the way you want it.
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: But if it comes up as a big wave file or it comes up as a video, we go.
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: We know what we need to do with this.
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: We take the audio and we put it in the correct format for you.
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: So on the technical side, you really shouldn't be running into any issues.
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: Whatever works best for you works best for you.
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: The biggest hurdle I see is mostly on the creator side.
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: We all feel you know it's intimidating to put yourself on the internet at the beginning If you're not used to being on video.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: Be on video in the beginning.
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: If you aren't used to recording podcasts, the sound of your own voice everybody finds disturbing the first time they listen to it.
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: Editing yourself is really tough.
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: All of these emotional and like creator focused problems come up, and so mostly I end up talking to podcasters much more about how do you push past those feelings of imposter syndrome or just not thinking the audio is good enough.
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: How do we get you past that so that you can start creating things online, and sometimes technical issues will come up, but mostly those are the much easier ones to solve than the stuff that we're all dealing with as creators.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: As somebody who spent almost two decades in print newspaper journalism.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we used to duck the cameras when the TV station showed up.
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: It's a little weird to be looking at a camera right now.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: Jumping into a little bit more of the technical stuff, though, you mentioned that when folks upload it, we take it and we fix the audio.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: We can deal with the file.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: The Wii is becoming more and more technological and helping reduce the man hours involved in that.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: Can you explain a little bit about some of the tools you guys have implemented over there to help yourselves and improve the turnaround time and just put out a cleaner product?
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so we've been podcasting for a long time.
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: I've run a show for Buzzsprout called Buzzcast for the last five years and a lot of the people on the team have podcasts of their own and we're constantly using our own product.
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: And one of the things that came up for me was once we were done with an edit.
• 13:00
  Speaker 2: It was really painful then to go and like, re-engage with the episode and go, okay, oh, where should chapter markers be?
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: Well, mostly what would happen?
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: If I thought where should those markers be?
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: I'd go, ah, forget it, I'm not going to go recheck the whole episode.
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: And then I think, what should the title be?
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: And I'd come up with something really boring because I didn't really want to go and try to be creative again and re-engage.
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: And so we built Co-Host AI which would transcribe the episodes, it would find chapter markers, it would come up with social posts, it would come up with title ideas.
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: It would do all sorts of work for you and sometimes you aren't going to pick the exact title, but of all the ideas we give you, you'll see some and go, oh, those are pretty good, I like those ideas, and it kind of kicks off a little bit more of a creative process for yourself.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: I've definitely.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: I've definitely done that before I've done.
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: I don't like any of these five, but I can tweak that one and it's 10 seconds worth of work instead of 10 minutes of struggling to come up with something.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: It's funny, I didn't expect this to happen until really all these large language models came out.
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: I always thought I'd be really good at the creativity part and I'd come up with the first thing and something else would polish it.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: The first thing is, something else would polish it, and I found it to be most often flipped.
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: Now I'm asking uh, you know AI or something like co-host AI?
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: Hey, give me a bunch of ideas and now I'll be the curator, I'll figure out which ones feel right.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: And mostly when you see something that's wrong, you very quickly go, oh, but I that's wrong.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: But now I know what the correct answer should be.
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: Now I can put that in as the title Very, very, very much.
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: The next one is magic mastering.
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: So for a lot of podcasters, you've done all the work.
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: You've come up with a topic, you've researched it, you've recorded it, you've become a part-time editor, you've become a part-time podcast promoter, and at least one piece that we knew we could help with was mastering getting audio levels right, cleaning up audios, removing background noise, and so we built Magic Mastering, which will do all of that for you to make your audio sound as crisp and clean as possible.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: So when we're fixing the file type, we'll clean up the audio and then we'll give you ideas for what your description and your titles and everything else should be.
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: Try to just simplify that last bit of podcasting to make sure, once you're done with that edit, we're ready to take you to the next level.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: And the other thing that's saving people is a lot of time on the post production, post recording side of things.
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: This is not only having to learn how to edit, but then go back and go through the episode level everything out.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: Check your this.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: This Brings a turnaround time from recording to the ability to upload it and put it out on the web.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: Huge reductions.
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I mean.
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: What I see very often is somebody says, all right, I'm an expert in some topic area.
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: Maybe they are a expert with houseplants and they're really good at helping you grow plants for your home good at helping you grow plants for your home.
• 16:18
  Speaker 2: They're not an expert in talking online, creating content, marketing content, podcasting, figuring out mics all of that.
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: And unfortunately, they do need to become pretty good at, or at least learn how to do a handful of those things.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: As many as we can take off of their plate, the more we improve the chances that they will get a podcast out to the world at the end.
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: And we want to make sure that that's as simple as possible, because we don't just want them to show up for one episode.
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: We want to be their partner for the next hundred episodes where they're continuously getting better at their craft.
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: They're putting out more podcasts even after the initial hype of, okay, I'm doing a new thing.
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: Once that's worn off, we want to make sure this is an easy process.
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: So getting an episode out every week really isn't burdensome.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: And we've found that to be very, very true.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: In fact, it helps us a lot to be able to just pop them, bring them back from the editors, drop them in and they're pretty well ready to go.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: You spend about five minutes tweaking whatever you need, scheduling it out.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: Scheduling it out is wonderful for a place like podcastvideoscom, because we're working with multiple shows, different release days and dates and times, and it really helps us stay ahead of the game.
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: That's awesome.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about fan mail.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: Fan mail is actually how you and I started corresponding, thanks to Tom Hanks.
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: It's something I knew.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: With our new website, we could do a little test and tune on, run a GIF as a picture and put a little sound bite in there, just to make sure we had those capabilities on our end, and, of course, something about it jumped it right into the top of the Googles, where you saw it.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: Uh, talk a little bit about about fan mail and the idea that, uh, that we're bringing email directly to the same account that they're posting the show out of.
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: Uh sure, so the idea with fan mail.
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: We we experienced this ourselves.
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: You know we were constantly trying new things.
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: How do we get our customers or listeners to report a podcast?
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: How do we get our podcast listeners to interact with the show?
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: And I tried things where people could record and message online and we'd include it in the podcast.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: I put an email address in the episode descriptions.
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: It's had email us anything you want to tell us.
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: I started a Twitter account for our podcast, said hey, just tweeted us and then we'll know about it.
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: We tried stuff with setting as boosted cramps, which were like using crypto payments to send messages.
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: We would try any and everything that was out there.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: And at the beginning of the year we were talking about how to reach the show.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: My co-host and producer, jordan, kind of lists off the 12 ways somebody could message the show and our other co-host, kevin, goes man, we've got to figure this out this year and I had noticed more and more marketers start using text messages to reach people, because all of our inboxes, especially for email, had gotten flooded.
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: Social media was flooded.
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: Everything seemed to be totally saturated, but one thing that, at least for me, has been only ever for friends and a hundred percent read and a hundred percent respond rate has been my text messages.
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: I always read them.
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: If it's ever something I don't want, I unsubscribe immediately.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: But most of my friends that's how we chat and so I went.
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: You know I signed up for this service called Slick Text where I could have a number and message with people.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: So let's put that in our show notes.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: And immediately we knew we had something.
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: Because if you think about the way podcasts work, people are listening on their phone and they're hearing something and you say, hey, tell us your experience with whatever our topic is.
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: You know, share your perspective.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: If they can click the show notes and it opens up the text messages on their phone, they can just type something out really quickly.
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: We all know email is very formal.
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: All these other things require downloading another app or engaging with something that you may not have set up.
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: But texting it's set up on your phone, it's informal, it's easy.
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: You send off a quick text and you're done.
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's intuitive because that phone is already in their hand.
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: It feels like a very point-to-point personal communication.
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: Exactly, and if you ever have like a typo in an email, you feel embarrassed, but a typo in a text is totally fine.
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: Sending four texts back-to-back, you don't feel that weird about it.
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: You would never do that, though, on email, sure.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: And so there's something about the relationship.
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: It just felt way more low risk, and we saw that come through in the numbers.
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: All of a sudden we started getting lots of messages and so pretty quickly we said, all right, this is something, let's build it into bus sprout, very cool.
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: And so now anybody who turns fan mail on for their podcast'll get a little link in their show notes and if any of their listeners click that link, they'll send a text and we will route that text to the podcast that they're trying to reach.
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: So podcasters can hear directly from their audience, and so far it's just been like a ton of fun If people who are messaging me I've got a few of them on my phone today that are saying you know things about the episode or sharing their feedback, and we're able to connect tons of podcasters with their audience, who are already listening, albin thanks for joining us here at podcastvideoscom.
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: You've been a great guest for Story Scaling and are the first of our outside industry experts.
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: Hopefully we'll have a chance to talk again.
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: Thank you, dan, I really appreciate it.